Palin explain Sputnik Moment

by bohm 17 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  bohm

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=floM6Idv94c

  Palin explain recent world history.
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  zoiks

  I caught that. Talk about missing the point, geez.
• 

  bohm

  Either she act stupid, or she is stupid.

  "double-u tee ef moment"

  I bet she has many of those when she see jeopardy!
• 

  Band on the Run

  She frightens me mightily. I believe she led many Republicans to vote for Obama. John McCain was ancient and acted like it. Sarah Palin was supposed to bring youth and women to the ticket. He proved to all that he could not exercise sound judgment. I lived in NYC so I could go to Coney Island with binocoulars and voila I am an expert on Europe and Africa.

  I am progressive. Attending certain history and political events, I mix with Republican conservatives who have heft and thoughtfulness. She is a supreme example of the dumbing down of America. I feel she has no sincerity. It is all about poll numbers and ambition. What scares me is that neutral groups have researched Dems and GOPS knowledge of objective facts. GOPs do not perform well. They are misinformed. FOX news insulates their beliefs even more. Talk radio confirms their world view.

  The scary part is that people take her serously. Stranger things have happened. Her arrogance about newspapers, etc. is amazing. She is looney bin time. William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol are not looney bin people. Her job is to inflame situations.

  I never viewed George W. Bush as stupid. Rather, I thought he had image problems but was sly as a fox. With Palin, I believe she is not well educated at all. Minimally educated would be an apt description. She, too, is a sly as a fox. On the other hand, she may be the best answer to Dems prayers.
• 

  Band on the Run

  She frightens me mightily. I believe she led many Republicans to vote for Obama. John McCain was ancient and acted like it. Sarah Palin was supposed to bring youth and women to the ticket. He proved to all that he could not exercise sound judgment. I lived in NYC so I could go to Coney Island with binocoulars and voila I am an expert on Europe and Africa.

  I am progressive. Attending certain history and political events, I mix with Republican conservatives who have heft and thoughtfulness. She is a supreme example of the dumbing down of America. I feel she has no sincerity. It is all about poll numbers and ambition. What scares me is that neutral groups have researched Dems and GOPS knowledge of objective facts. GOPs do not perform well. They are misinformed. FOX news insulates their beliefs even more. Talk radio confirms their world view.

  The scary part is that people take her serously. Stranger things have happened. Her arrogance about newspapers, etc. is amazing. She is looney bin time. William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol are not looney bin people. Her job is to inflame situations.

  I never viewed George W. Bush as stupid. Rather, I thought he had image problems but was sly as a fox. With Palin, I believe she is not well educated at all. Minimally educated would be an apt description. She, too, is a sly as a fox. On the other hand, she may be the best answer to Dems prayers.
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  bohm

  Band on the run: That echo my thoughts. She seem genuinely relieved when the talk went over to her family.
• 

  Room 215

  Band on the Run: I concur with much of your observations; but GWB not stupid? I doubt he could recite the pledge of allegiance without a teleprompter!
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  miseryloveselders

  Personally, I believe she's playing a role and cashing in on it. In the same fashion that Glenn Beck disingenuously manufactures tears for his audience, Palin is entertaining all those quasi conservatives gullible enough to take her seriously. Politics anymore reminds me of WWE wrestling. It's just a bunch of colorful characters playing a role for our entertainment. The scary part about it is just like wrestling, there's some people who still haven't figured it out that its all for show. Oppurtunists such as Palin and Beck are all more than willing to take advantage of those people. They're similar to hustlers, pimps, and drug dealers. I find it dispicable is that they're willing to sacrifice progress and realistic debate in this country so they can cash in on their books, and their speeches, and TV interviews. The same way pimps and drug dealers promote and sell poison in their communities, hindering progress and ruining lives, these showboat politicians sell and promote poison hindering real dialogue in this country. The blame can go towards both political parties, but conservatives seem to have the bulk of quasi members. To be fair, maybe quasi conservatives just scream the loudest via Fox News, or as mentioned earlier like Palin they say whatever just to stir controversy and keep their names in the news.
• 

  BizzyBee

  BOTR: Well said. It is the fact that she has traction with certain segments of the population that is scary. Otherwise, she's just a minor failed politician among many.

  Palin talks a lot about "common sense" as her guiding principle in governing. But, incidents such as the 'Sputnik moment' and the 'blood libel' gaffe prove that her ignorance of history, failure to prepare, and lack of critical thinking skills are detrimental to her political performance and potentially disastrous to a presidential administration.

  As someone commented, "She's face-planting at double-speed now."

  Here's another couple of takes on Palin's 'Sputnik moment' and more:

  Sarah Palin's weird 'Sputnik' story

  By Stephen Stromberg

  On Wednesday night, Sarah Palin attacked the "Sputnik moment" line from President Obama's second State of the Union address.

  That was another one of those WTF moments, when he so often repeated this Sputnik moment that he would aspire Americans to celebrate. And he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

  Yikes.

  In her rant, Palin wildly misconstrued the president's argument, which was not about emulating the Soviets in the 1950s but instead about the Americans who responded to early Soviet success in space exploration by educating themselves and out-innovating the Soviets. Did she listen to the speech? Alexandra Petri has more on this here .

  But let's pretend that wasn't Obama's point. The Soviets didn't have an empire-draining debt problem until some 30 years after Sputnik passed over America. And when they did, it was in large part a result of massive overinvestment in heavy industry, which supported Soviet military pretensions. None of this is to argue that the Soviet economy is anything we should emulate. But let's at least get the basic facts right when we criticize it.

  It's a fair guess that Palin thought she was borrowing her "insight" from the mythology of Ronald Reagan, who massively increased America's spending to spur the sort of competitive expenditure that contributed to the ballooning of Soviet debt in the 1980s. According to many conservatives, this was a -- if not the -- crucial factor that catalyzed the Soviet collapse.

  But in claiming that the Soviets incurred their consequential debts long before Reagan was president, Palin ends up arguing that the Gipper wasn't nearly that responsible for the USSR spending itself to death. If a reverence for Reagan's anti-Soviet spending inspired her narrative in the first place, then this is incoherent. If she's just making this all up, then she's really also claiming that the Reagan-brought-down-the-USSR narrative is overstated.

  Palin appears to be lazily checking a lot of Fox News boxes. She wants to criticize Obama's State of the Union address, so she grabs hold of the Sputnik line. She wants to make a point about debt, so she invents a history in which the USSR had a debt crisis decades before this inference could have made much sense. Even better -- her argument sounds like an implicit vindication of Reagan, but that really just makes it either self-contradictory or hostile to Reagan's legacy.

  Even worse, it seems that Palin planned her rhetorical disaster, as she goes on to discuss the "Spudnut Shop," a bakery in Washington State that's succeeding without government support. Yet more evidence that her judgment in both what she says and who she has vetting it is pathetic. It's not even cleverly manipulative. It's just dreck.

  WTF Moments with Palin on the 'Race to Space,' Sputnik, and Spudnut

  By Alexandra Petri

  Dear Sarah Palin,

  Based on your comments to Greta van Susteren on Fox News last night about the State of the Union address, I think there has been a slight misunderstanding. Or, possibly, several large misunderstandings.

  I liked your coinage of "WTF moments" from President Obama's phrase, "winning the future."

  I also enjoyed your analysis that:

  That was another one of those WTF moments, when he so often repeated this Sputnik moment that he would aspire Americans to celebrate. And he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

  It's not that I agree with the sentiments you are expressing, but I like the way you say it. It's like a tonal poem. It sounds like the classic Beatles song "Dig a Pony," with people aspiring other people to celebrate things in a strange, contorted syntax.

  But I have to say: seriously?

  Even I understood what the Sputnik Moment was supposed to refer to. It's the moment when you suddenly notice, to your chagrin, that someone else is making strides and you need to step up your game. President Obama wasn't saying "We need to do the modern-day equivalent of launching the first man-made satellite into orbit." He wasn't saying, "We must emulate the USSR, socialize the means of production, and give unconvincing factory tours until our inevitable collapse that was, honestly, not in any way triggered by the spending that went into our side of the race to space." Or at least if he did, I missed that portion of the speech.

  What he was saying was, we need to look ahead so we don't fall behind. I don't want to split hairs about whether the Space Race and the Race to Space are the same or different -- they did win the race to put something in space, if not what is popularly referred to as the Space Race, which culminated in our landing on the moon, so, well, okay, let's, as Adam Sandler says, Just Go With It.

  But after this, for several minutes that we as a nation will never get back, you rambled about a bakery called the "Spudnut Shop," that doesn't want the government telling it how to operate, or something:

  Well, the spudnut shop in Richland, Washington -- it's a bakery, it's a little coffee shop that's so successful, 60-some years, generation to generation, a family-owned business not looking for government to bail them out and to make their decisions for them. It's just hard-working, patriotic Americans in this shop.

  We need more spudnut moments in America. And I wish that President Obama would understand, in that heartland of America, what it is that really results in the solutions that we need to get this economy back on the right track. It's a shop like that.

  Yes, that is what we need to get the economy back on track.

  A bakery.

  Not more expertise in math and science, engineering, technology, and developing enterprises that will allow us to compete with the rest of the world. A bakery, full of Real Americans.

  Do you realize how this sounds? This is like if I were to say, "Hey, I think we need to take a course to familiarize ourselves with what actually caused the Soviet Union to collapse!" and you were to respond, "Anything can be solved with Hard Work, donuts, and the American Way!" It's as if I were to say, "Let's study geometry!" and you were to respond, "Let's study Gia Spumanti, the red-blooded American protagonist of 'A Shore Thing.'" "Those two sound similar, but are in no way comparable," I would point out. And that's what this is. It's the kind of bizarre semi-sequitur that has always been a hallmark of your speaking style.

  I understand that this is supposed to be a tribute to the enterprising spirit of Americans. I am sure that, if I went to the Spudnut Shop in Richland, Wash., I would love the food and admire the industry of the people who have been making it work, without government assistance, for 60 years. And it's true: We need this.

  But this is like comparing spuds to sputniks. President Obama is talking about competing with the rest of the world. He's pointing out that we need to get our act together and try to commit to education and research that will allow us to make innovative strides comparable to the ones we made after we got that wake-up call from Sputnik. And you are -- rambling about bakeries with names that sound sort of similar? I guess? It's just not a responsible comparison.

  Yes, we need more Spudnut moments. We need self-sufficiency, work ethic, and delicious donuts here at home. But if we really want to get the economy back on track, we need a better-educated workforce, one that knows that the Space Race didn't bankrupt the Soviet Union, understands syntax, and doesn't just bloviate about bakeries.

  Thank you.
• 

  sspo

  She's soooo stupid along with Bachmann and Glenn Beck.

  What an embarassement!! Is this the best that the Republicans can come up with?

  I wish Palin would run in 2012 , we could all use a good laugh.